Union Library Workers

Sunday, February 25, 2018

University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign-Teaching assistants and graduate assistants with the Graduate Employees Organization plan to begin a work stoppage on Feb 26 unless they reach an agreement with the administration. They have worked without a contract for over 190 days, seeking terms that include guaranteed raises, better healthcare coverage, reduced academic fees and contractual protections that would continue to guarantee their full tuition waivers.

After hammering out a few details after the library board meeting on Feb. 5, the board and Grosse Pointe's librarians and support staff ratified a new contract. Library union president John Clexton says more negotiations are in store. "The contract is good until December 31, 2018. Although short, we hope to begin soon to work on working on negotiations for when that expires," he said.

While cooperation between unionized educators at charters and district schools in the United States is common, this is the first known case in which teachers from both types of schools have merged into a single union local.

The move was approved by 70 percent of voting members, according to the CTU. In a similar vote last June, 84 percent of ChiACTS members endorsed the merger.

“These results are the outcome of a lengthy dialogue among members,” CTU Vice President Jesse Sharkey said in a statement. “We’ve declared that we’re stronger together in one big union. We’ve embraced our common struggle to support our workers, our students, their parents and our neighborhoods.”

“Educators in district and charter school share the same challenges and the same commitment to our students and the public good,” said ChiACTS President Chris Baehrend. “Together we can more effectively fight for more fair, more equitable funding for our students and their needs, especially for our underserved Black and Brown students and their families.”

Here’s what I learned from this experience, our one big
success—we are the only unit on campus with a negotiated
contract. Our big failure—the livelihood of much of our
casual labor force has been devastated. Management is
highly organized. They were single-minded in their
efforts to control us. They have more money than us and
more power than us, but we outnumber them. In order
to push against forces that have more power than us, we
have to organize each other. We have to all be together,
working consistently in a forward direction over time. We were not organized enough to force management to
offer us a contract without concessions. We cannot let
that happen again. When we look at the world as it is right
now, there is so much we cannot let happen ever again.
We all have so much to stand against, to fight for, to
resist, and to organize to change for good.

Sitting in a construction trailer known as the “meeting room,” workers wearing boots covered in dirt and dry mud talk about what it’s like to build one of the biggest capital projects in Temple history: the new library. The four-story, 225,000-square-foot academic commons, at Liacouras and Polett walks, is being built by hundreds of union workers.

Meet six of those workers, who have a combined more than 180 years of experience in their trades. From carpenters and electricians to steel workers, meet the builders making this massive project at the heart of Main Campus come to life.